Blood Ties
by adlyb
Summary: She hadn't realized how important the bond between herself and her maker was until it was gone. A look at Damon, Elena, Stefan, and Caroline: their shared blood, and the ties that bind. Post-season 4.


**Blood Ties**

by adlyb

_I : Maker and Childe_

Disclaimer: I own nothing except these words.

Summary: She hadn't realized how important the bond between herself and her maker was until it was gone. A look at Damon, Elena, Stefan, and Caroline: their shared blood, and the ties that bind. Post-season 4.

Spoilers: Everything through seasons 4 and 5.

Rating: R

Warnings: Explicit sexual situations, violence, bloodplay

* * *

_Honestly, Stefan, I just wanted to thank you. For sticking by me, when I was at my worst. For believing that I was still in there. Even after everything I put you through, you never gave up on me._

_I kinda owed you one._

_You deserve whatever you want out of life._

_Look, I'm glad that you're okay with who you are now. But every single thing I did to get this, I did for you. So the choice of whether you want to be a vampire or not will always be yours._

* * *

In a moment, Katherine will tear her heart from her chest. If she could think through the pain of her doppelganger's fingers pushing through her chest cavity as though her muscles and bones are made of spider webs, Elena might have laughed. Tearing people's hearts out: this is what Katherine does best, one way or another.

But Elena can't think about those things. All of her thoughts are on survival. It's a trait she's inherited from her Petrova foremothers. The instinct is strong. Stronger than the pain, stronger, even, than Katherine's hatred.

Elena wants to survive, so she will survive. She's gone willingly to her death before, but she will not do it tonight. She crams her fingers into her skirt pocket. Her fingers slip against the ancient phial holding the cure.

"Say goodnight, sweetheart," Katherine croons.

The arteries holding her heart in place begin to break free.

Elena pulls the phial free just as a discarded broom handle punctures Katherine's heart.

She looks up into stormy blue eyes as Katherine gasps, "Damon?"

He spares Elena only a swift once-over before kneeling down and wrapping Katherine in his arms. "Shhh," he whispers as the gray veins spread like frost over her beautiful face. Long after she is already dead, he murmurs, "I've got you, Katherine."

Elena raises herself up by her elbows. Her chest nits itself back together, and inside, she can feel her heart re-aligning. It patters strangely at the sight of her lover and her enemy.

Still, Damon holds onto Katherine's corpse.

She feels uncertain how to break the moment, just knows that she wants to, very badly. It's not easy seeing her duplicate like this, frozen in ugly death. She reaches out and touches his arm. "Thank you for saving me, Damon."

Damon looks up and offers her a small, lopsided smile. "What kind of boyfriend would I be if I didn't swoop in to save my girl every now and then?" He eyes her hand, still clutched around the cure. "Though, looks like you might have had it covered."

She clears her throat and looks down. She doesn't want to talk about the cure anymore tonight. Not when they are both alive, and in love, and together, _finally_. She slips the phial back into her pocket, and wills herself to forget about it.

"So… should we bury her?" Elena asks. They've buried so many vampire corpses by now, and tried to bury Katherine so many times, that she can't help the practicality that comes through in her voice.

Damon's smile falters, for just a moment. His fingers twitch where they are caught in Katherine's curls. "Nah, I think I've got this one. Tell you what. You go home, and I'll meet you back there."

Elena raises her eyebrow. "Are you sure?"

"Yeah, I got it. I'll meet you there."

* * *

He's back an hour later, clothes a little muddy, a frown pinching his eyes in a way she wouldn't have noticed even last year. She wonders, a little, when she got to know Damon so well. Was it the summer Stefan was gone? Or more recently, in those weeks preceding the revelation that she was sire bonded to him?

She puts the thought aside and approaches him where he stands by the parlor fireplace, braced against the mantelpiece. She comes up behind him, wraps her arms around his waist and rests her face against his shoulder blade. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine. She's buried. Chapter ended."

Elena pulls back. "You don't sound fine."

He steps away and stalks over to the bar to pour himself a drink. "I'm better than _fine_, Elena. I'm _thrilled. _Life of the party. Having a hoot. Bitch is _dead_." He smiles on this last part, the eye-crinkling smile he wears when he's in agony.

She thinks of how he had held Katherine as she died.

This was not how she had wanted their first night together as a couple to go.

"Why… why are you so upset? You've tried to kill Katherine like a million times. I thought… I thought you were over her."

Damon sighs, and it's like he's expelling every breath he's ever taken in the last one-hundred-and-sixty-seven years. He puts his drink down and comes back to her. Puts his arms around her shoulders and looks intently into her eyes. "She was going to kill you, and I made my choice between the two of you a long time ago.

"But?"

"But she was the one who turned me. It's her blood in my veins. For a hundred and fifty years, she was the beginning and end of everything I was. And… I can't help but ache a little bit, that she's gone."

Elena frowns. She would ache if Damon were gone—she would ache forever. But that was different. She _loves _him.

"I don't understand," she tells him finally, carefully. "You weren't sired to her. Why does that blood connection matter?" It's like eating vervain to speak civilly about her brother's murderer, but she can do it, for Damon's sake. She would do anything for him.

He tucks her hair behind her ear. "You're so young, still. You've barely lived." His hand drops. "Katherine was everything to me, once. Turns out, forgetting her isn't so easy."

"But you still killed her for me?" She means it as a statement, but the question—_why?_—still worms its way in.

Damon gives her a smile—a real one, this time. "I told you. I will always choose you." He pulls her close again, twining their fingers and swaying to a melody only he can hear.

Elena lets go of their conversation and lets herself be reeled in, a star pulled inexorably toward a black hole sun.

To be held in Damon's arm. To dance with him. It was all she ever wanted.

_Forgetting isn't so easy. _

Months later, she regrets not paying more mind to what Damon had said.

* * *

Sometimes, when she wakes up in Damon's bed, she flashes back to last summer. She'd needed him then, in ways she had never needed anyone before. The guilt, the loss, the loneliness and the desperate, exhausting hope would have swallowed her whole if he had not been beside her, with her for every step of the way.

There had been the search for Stefan, of course. They had sleuthed through newspapers and maps all summer, gone on more than one roadtrip only to turn up with a false lead, or worse, just a little too late.

But there had also been all of the quiet days, far outnumbering the hectic ones. Days when she stayed curled up on the Salvatore parlor couch, writing in her journal with her feet in Damon's lap. Days when he read to her from his worn copy of _Gone with the Wind_, interjecting every now and then about how it had really been, until she fell asleep.

In the beginning, he'd brought her to Stefan's room, but she would always find her way into his bedroom before dawn. He would hold her close to him when she crawled into bed beside him, when she would bury her nose against his throat and breathe him in. He wasn't Stefan, but he was still a Salvatore. And if one thing was true, it was that Elena loved and needed the Salvatore brothers. Both of them.

That summer had been her undoing – Katherine's words played in a never-ending loop through her brain – _It's okay to love them both_.

Katherine's words were so convincing, when Damon was there for every crisis of her life. He had been her rock solid, the person on whom she knew she could always rely, and it was his steadfast love which had won her to him in the end. By the time she had turned, the impulse to turn to him with her every problem had already evolved well past habit—it was instinct.

That summer without Stefan, followed by the year he'd returned to her as a shade of the man she had loved, had put an end to the bond between them. By the time he was himself again, Damon had stood between them, and she had no longer thought to go around him.

* * *

Elena awakens the morning after she declared her love for Damon and, for a crystal clear moment, thinks it's the summer before her senior year.

It's the feeling of Damon, pressed naked against her, sharp teeth tight against her neck, that sets her straight. It's an embrace he started giving her only after she'd turned.

Nevertheless, the confusion gives her a bad feeling in the pit of her stomach.

She shoves the thought out of her way and presses closer into Damon's arms. She can feel him stirring into wakefulness. His arms tighten around her and the angle of his mouth changes, so that his fangs nearly prick her. He is hard against her thigh. If she shifts, just a fraction, his teeth will slide into her neck. The feeling of him against her, nearly but not quite inside of her, drives her wild. She needs to feel him, whatever way she can.

There's no need to speak when he uses his inhuman strength and speed to flip her onto her back. Elena arches her neck, spreads her legs. To feel his teeth pierce her, to have his cock inside of her. It's a different dance than the one he used to seduce her that first time, but it's no less potent.

The connection to him she feels when they share each other like this is beyond her teenage fantasies of true love. This is something else. _Magic_, a secret part of her mind whispers.

* * *

After, Damon laps the blood from her neck, tongue rough and thorough.

"Just another day in Mystic Falls," she muses.

He lifts his head and raises an eyebrow. "Hm?"

She cards her fingers through his hair before she answers. "Well, I mean, we dropped the veil, the ghosts of all our loved ones came back to visit and then ghosts of all our enemies tried to kill us, we graduated, and _then_ we had a really dramatic argument in front of the fire that ended in bone-melting sex. So typical day, I think." She leaves out the part where he killed his once-upon-a-time-one-true-love for her.

Damon raises his eyebrow. "I resent calling the sex 'typical.' I think 'epic' is closer to the word you were looking for."

She rolls her eyes and swats at him. "I said 'bone-melting.' That wasn't enough?"

He runs his hand down the length of her body, pauses at her knees. "For you and me? Not even close." He rocks his hips against her, and she can tell they're just a moment away from going another round.

She giggles when he twists an errant curl around his finger, and uses it to reel her in for a kiss. "I'll take it under advisement. But I may need more proof. Care to demonstrate?"

Damon runs his fingers over her shoulders. "I always believe in giving the lady what she wants."

They make love languorously. They have time for that now. He dips two fingers inside of her, feels her flutter around him, before pulling them out sucking her wetness off of them. She kisses him to taste herself, sucks on his tongue and nips at his lips until she tastes blood.

When Damon pushes into her, she wraps her arms and legs around him, arching into his touch. She wants to be so close to him that their scents mingle, that it becomes impossible to tell the two of them apart.

* * *

They make it out of bed, eventually, only to stumble into Damon's enormous bathtub. Water sloshes on the floor when she straddles him, and she wonders how they've never done this before.

He holds her afterward, her back to his chest, while they soak.

"I never did get to say goodbye to Jeremy," she tells him softly, when their satiated silence has become a different sort of quiet.

"We don't always get to say goodbye to the people we love. Sometimes we just have to love them, and hope that they know it in the end."

She wonders if she would have found Jeremy if Katherine hadn't gotten in the way.

She hasn't forgotten the way Damon held her at the end.

"Did you still love her?" She wishes she could let this go, even as she waits for an answer. She's glad she cannot see his face.

He takes a long time to answer, but when he does, it's with a story she's never heard before. It's all she can do to sit and listen.

When he speaks, his voice is very far away. "Once, I had thought Katherine was the one. I proposed to her, you know, the morning after the first time we made love. I was sure, after that, that that was what she would want. I'd thought we could get married, raise children together. I'd deserted the Confederacy, so my reputation was ruined in Virginia, but there was land out west, and opportunity to start over. I offered her my mother's ring, told her I didn't need to be wealthy, because I was rich so long as I had her. She wouldn't hear me out, of course—left the room without even letting me know why she had rejected me."

"That was before you knew she was a vampire."

She can feel him nod. "She revealed herself to me that night. That was the end for me. The fatal moment. I didn't turn away, didn't stick to what _I _had wanted for my life—none of that mattered anymore. I was willing to do anything for love. Even die."

"She was always testing me though," he continued. "Brought me out into the woods, made me watch while she played the damsel in distress, tricked a carriage into stopping, and murdered everyone inside."

He'd taught her that trick just last month. It disturbs her to know where he'd gotten it from.

"She used to kiss me afterwards, blood on her mouth, dripping down her chin onto her silk dresses, her fangs bared."

"That seems cruel."

He shrugged. "Maybe, but I didn't care. I was in love. I just knew I wanted her, any way I could have her… even if it meant becoming a vampire. I was willing to accept all of her, love all of her, even her cruelty, if that's what it took to be with her. But she wouldn't have me. I thought she was going to turn me—_just me_—but of course Katherine never did anything once if she could get away with it twice. And even after all of that, I still thought… but you were there for that last year, when she wasn't in the tomb.

"I thought I had Katherine, the way she had me. But I never really did, because she was never honest with me. She always hid a part of herself—the part that was running, as it turns out."

"And now I am yours, Elena. Do I have you?" She turns to face him, and his eyes are so heavy. They have a still intensity she has not seen in them since they opened the tomb. It's an inhuman expression, something that belies his age, his immortal heart. If she did not know better, she would think he was compelling her.

There's a stone in her throat. Her love for him throbs. _"Yes. Forever."_

* * *

It's a few days later, when she brings up the other thing on her mind.

She has to ask: "If it had been possible for two people to take the cure, would you have wanted it? To live as humans, to live that life you were just talking about, with me?"

He's careful when he responds. "Not a chance. I used to think being a vampire was a curse… but I've realized it can be a kind of paradise under the right circumstances."

"Which are?"

He smiles, the same smile he gave her after their first night together. "When you find the right person to spend eternity with."


End file.
